Now We’re Dancing

The Hunt for the Holocron website launched in 2003. Over the years, the site became a chronicle of our adventures trying to get the film made.

In 2007, it went silent, and for all intents and purposes the project did, too.

The Spitzfire Productions computer system had suffered a catastrophic hardware failure. All of the work on the film to that point was lost. To complete the film, 36 hours of footage would have to be recaptured, all of the scenes recut, all of the effects completed to that point redone… it was an unmitigated disaster.

The days that followed were the closest the film ever came to being abandoned entirely.

Still, a small candle of hope flickered. In 2012, some members of the crew – tired of waiting to actually see the film they had worked so hard to create – rented a movie theater and informed director Martin Spitznagel that he would be premiering the film in April 2013.

It was a risky gambit, but it worked. A small team of people worked on the film every day for months, hour upon hour, trying to piece it together. Martin flew to Texas three times for effects shoots and begged actors he hadn’t seen in years to come re-record dialog they’d said ten years earlier. He was still working on the film morning the before it premiered.

When the lights went down in the theater and the audience cheered, however, all of that melted away. The night confirmed everything we wanted to believe about the value of making things.

To celebrate the release of the film, we registered a proper domain name and the website was relaunched on a modern content management system – Wordpress – to give the film a multi-platform home on the web for years to come.

In keeping with the theme of “technological failures” that have plagued this project, however – at this point, it’s like a running gag – eight months after the site relaunch, a database error corrupted the site. The domain sat vacant for the better part of a year, giving everyone who visited it the impression that the film was little more than a YouTube release.

The site relaunch today affirms Hunt for the Holocron‘s perennial resilience, and will continue to chronicle our journey for the enjoyment and inspiration of others.